At the Villa Rose

04/08/2017

Genre historians (or readers of my blog remembering my series on Edgar winners) know of that strange period in the Sixties when the MWA turned their backs on local talent and gave the Best Novel prize to British writers eight years in a row. I've always found this miniature "British invasion" interesting first for what it said about the current state of American crime fiction - then hardly in its finest hour coming after the creative explosion of the Fifties - and also because several (well, most) of those winners from abroad were virtually ignored at home. If you take a glance at Golden Dagger and Edgar winners for that period you'll see that they overlap only once - when John Le Carré became the first of only two writers, both Brits as it happens, ever to scoop both awards for the same book. Of the other seven British Best Novel winners only two - Julian Symons's The Progress of a Crime and Eric Ambler's The Light of Day - secured a Gold Dagger nomination; the remaining ones didn't get any love and their Edgar success must have surprised a lot of people in their country of origin, probably including the authors themselves. Conversely, the Golden Dagger winners of the period barely made it to the Edgar shortlist, with only Lionel Davidson (The Night of Wenceslas) and H.R.F. Keating (The Perfect Murder) being able to achieve some recognition - but no win. Obviously the Yanks had their own idea of what the best of British crime fiction was, an idea the persons concerned didn't agree with. The feeling was reciprocated for in the meantime the CWA rewarded two perennial American Edgar losers, Ross MacDonald and Emma Lathen, for books that the MWA had completely bypassed. It was only the beginning. Over the next five decades both awards would routinely ignore each other's choices and now and then try to be smart by nominating/rewarding a book that was ignored on the other side of the Atlantic, a reminder that the Americans and the British still hold different views about "good" crime fiction - and that's fine by me. Besides, why should they agree when American awards themselves rarely do with each other? But more on this later.

24/07/2017

"Call me old-fashioned, bjt without twists I don't consider crime short stories worthy of the name, and regret that that seems no longer to be the rule."Thus spoke the late British crime writer David Williams, as quoted by Tim Heald in his introduction to the final volume of the Folio Club's Great Stories of Crime and Detection. Heald contrasts this with Liza Cody's following statement about the story of hers that she selected for inclusion in the collection:"It wasn't a whodunit or even a whydunnit and there isn't any suspense because you already know what happened. But it was horribly ambitious because it attempted to take you into the mind of an ignorant, prejudiced kid as she comes to some intuition about the real victim became a victim."

David Williams

Heald then goes on to say that both approaches are valid and takes them as evidence that the genre is more varied and ambitious than it was back in the Golden Age (Heald must have read and enjoyed Julian Symons's Bloody Murder) I for one would say that there is a fundamental difference between Williams and Cody's takes on their craft that Heald fails to see: Williams aims to write crime short fiction whereas Cody writes short fiction that happens to be (peripherically) about a crime. And Williams is right that his views while formerly mainstream are no longer predominant - it was already true back in 2002 and is a truism now as the perusing of any edition of Otto Penzler's Best American Mystery Stories series will show.

Jack Ritchie

Part of my upbringing as a mystery reader was done by reading Alfred Hitchcock anthologies; they were replete with the kind of stories David Williams cherished, and I loved them. Even when I guessed how it would end, I was admirative of the writers's ability to constantly renew their plots, characters and settings and pack the whole thing into less than thirty pages. Being an aspiring writer at the time who struggled with length, I was happy to see there was nothing wrong with keeping things short. People like Jack Ritchie, Henry Slesar, Arthur Porges, Edward D. Hoch, C.B. Gilford, Robert Arthur became demi-gods to me and I still read or re-read their work with untarnished pleasure.None of their stories would make it into a modern anthology, however - and interestingly only Ritchie and Hoch won awards. They were too plot-driven and not "ambitious" enough at a time when a good crime story must read more like Raymond Carver than Stanley Ellin. Most recent Edgar winners in the Short Story category I don't recognize at crime fiction - at least, my kind of it - at all (and some are openly not, such as John Connolly's otherwise fine The Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository or Stephen King's Obits which are fantasy rather than mystery) I remember my amazement when reading Otto Penzler boasting in his preface to one of his anthologies that very few or none at all involved a detective or a puzzle, one of them dispensing with a crime altogether. I didn't buy the book and left the bookstore wondering what had happened to crime fiction. I should have asked David Williams; he knew.

06/07/2017

Nobody asked for it but here they are nevertheless - my own twelve favorite crime/mystery stories! Hard as I tried to be more inclusive and contemporary than the 1950 jury, my list reflects my strong preference for vintage crime; the earliest story - which also happens to be the single French-language entry - is more than thirty years old. Also, despite my criticisms of the original Golden Dozen for being too biased towards traditional mysteries my own list heavily favors the genre too, though it makes room for two crime stories, one thriller and a story that defies any categorization. Finally, I had not realized until now the thing I have for Christmas mysteries - two of them feature in this list and I was about to add a third (Stanley Ellin's Death on Christmas's Eve) when I thought it might be a little too much. The keen-eyed will notice that my list has no title in common with the 1950 one but that's because 1°) I tried to be original - you'll tell me how well I've succeeded - 2°) I haven't read all of the stories in it and didn't rate the ones I read as highly as the jurors did*. But enough talk, here it is and feel free to use the comment sections to give your opinion and if needed throw me some tomatoes!On Christmas Day in the Morning (Margery Allingham)The Glass Bridge (Robert Arthur)Blind Man's Hood (John Dickson Carr)The Eye of Apollo (G.K. Chesterton)Triangle at Rhodes (Agatha Christie)The Adventure of the Naval Treaty (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)Moonlight Gardener (Robert L. Fish)The Answer (Bruce M. Fisher)Lonely Place (C.B. Gilford)The Unlikely Demise of Cousin Claude (Charlotte MacLeod)Lettres de mon malin (Pierre Siniac)The Fall of the Coin (Ruth Rendell)*The greatness of The Hands of Ottermole still eludes me to this day, despite Boucher's praise and Doug Greene's attempts at converting me. Naboth's Vineyard I find to be one the weakest entries in the Uncle Abner canon; The Age of Miracles would have been a much better choice.

04/07/2017

The April 1950 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine deserves a place in the magazine's own hall of fame for introducing the world to John Dickson Carr's classic The Gentleman from Paris but the rest of the contents is equally impressive, boasting big names like Graham Greene, Rufus King, Margery Allingham or Lawrence G. Blochman. Anthony Berkeley is in too, with a reprint of The Avenging Chance, arguably his masterpiece in the short form and the matrix for his best-known novel, The Poisoned Chocolates Case. The story appears as part of a series devoted to the best mystery short stories ever - the Golden Dozen - as chosen by a "panel of perfectionists" composed among others of James Hilton, Howard Haycraft, John Dickson Carr, Anthony Boucher, Vincent Starrett, August Derleth, Viola Brothers Shore, Ellery Queen (of course) and James Sandoe. Queen's introduction provides us with both the official list of the "Lucky Twelve" and Sandoe's personal picks. Both lists overlap at times, but also bear some differences as we shall see.The "official" Golden Dozen

The Gioconda Smile (Aldous Huxley)The Yellow Slugs (H.C. Bailey)The Genuine Tabard (E.C. Bentley)Suspicion (Dorothy L. Sayers)James Sandoe's Golden DozenThe Avenging ChanceThe Hands of Mr. OttermoleThe Other Hangman (Carter Dickson)The Red-Headed LeagueThe Gioconda SmileSuspicionSail (Lester Dent)The Yellow SlugsThe Honour of Israel Gow (G.K. Chesterton)Death on Pine Street (Dashiell Hammett)The Man Who Murdered in Public (Roy Vickers)To a modern reader the most striking features of both lists are the heavy bias towards traditional detective stories and the strong showing of now comparatively obscure plot-spinners like Post, Futrelle, Bailey or Bentley. Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler and Cornell Woolrich are nowhere to be seen. Hardboiled, noir and psychological suspense despite their popularity at the time with the reading public don't seem to exist (though Sandoe departs by including two hardboiled stories in his list) This is not to say that their choices aren't good, for most of them are (don't get me started with Ottermole whose appeal I'll probably never understand) but they're typical of a mindset firmly stuck in the pre-WW2 years. A 2017 list would probably be more inclusive - but it would also lack most of the items listed here, which would be a pity. It would be interesting to know the other jurors's personal picks; I'm most curious as to Boucher's and of course Carr's (no risk of having him picking up a Chandler story!) What would be your own Golden Dozen? Feel free to post it in the comments section or on the blog's FB page - maybe I'll post mine if someone's interested.

22/06/2017

You may remember this article years ago in which I bemoaned the then-current rise of the ebook and pledged everlasting love to the printed paper. Amazon and its Kindle would never conquer me, I swore. Time passed and, well, only fools never change their minds as the old French saying goes. I now have two Kindles and use them a lot, mostly to read those long-lost, most but not all public domain, mysteries that the ebook bubble suddenly brought back to light. I still cling to my paper books and they prevail every time I'm allowed to choose, but I would have missed a lot of amazing stuff had I stuck to my initial Luddite feeling.

One of those digital discoveries is Jacques Futrelle and his Thinking Machine stories. Rediscovery would be a better word as I already knew both the creator and his creature for having read a sample of their output via Roland Lacourbe's excellent French-language anthology Treize enquêtes de la Machine à Penser. They made a more than favorable impression upon me and I was eager for more, but alas those thirteen stories were all that was available in French at the time, and my English was not yet good enough to allow me to read Futrelle in the original language. Besides, most of his stories were out of print and not easily available. I moved on to other, more recent writers but kept an eye on Amazon and other purveyors in the hope that someone reprints the whole Van Dusen canon.Fast forward fifteen years and nearly all of Futrelle's output is available for free or very cheap in the Kindle store. I bought a Thinking Machine megapack and started to read, one story at the time, a little afraid not to be able to recapture my initial enthusiasm. I needed not worry: the stories I had read were as good as I remembered them, and the other were for the most part very pleasant surprises.What amazed me and still amazes me most is how well the stories have aged - probably because they were ahead of their time in many respects. The plots are imaginative and clever if sometimes far-fetched and play fair with the reader at a time when it was not yet a requirement. They also use a lot of misdirection, which is another unusual feature in pre-Trent detective fiction. This is not to say that Futrelle saw his stories as a duel of wits between him and the reader, but neither did he think of them as pure exercises in ratiocination - he was out to puzzle and fool, not just lay down a problem and then provide an explanation. Another modern feature of his work, perhaps the one that keeps it fresh after all those years, is the writing, which is much less stilted than that of his contemporaries, especially British ones. Being a journalist by trade Futrelle knew how to tell a gripping story with a few words and without excessive flourish. This kind of writing, which John Dickson Carr would call "journalese", would become a distinctive feature of the American school of crime fiction, regardless of the subgenre and may have been a leading factor in its global success and influence on the long run. Finally there is the Thinking Machine, Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen himself. Futrelle may have created him partly with his tongue in his cheek, as Van Dusen like Poirot later exhibits some physical features (the size and shape of his head in particular) that were bigger than life even then. Still, he is a memorable character and one of the best detectives of his time. Modern readers may find him unlikeable, but so were many of his colleagues at the time - readers then didn't seek to relate to a fictional detective but to be awed by him, and Van Dusen certainly delivers in that department. It is interesting to compare him with the other great detective scientist of the time, Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke - both share an encyclopaedic knowledge and near-universal expertise but Van Dusen has a more abrasive temper and speaks in a much less ornate way. Also, Van Dusen tend to rely less on arcane knowledge than Thorndyke's. The only serious problem with Futrelle, and one he sadly couldn't fix, is that he died too soon to reach his full potential. Had he not embarked on the Titanic he might have gone to even greater things and maybe dramatically hastened the evolution of American crime fiction. Be that as it may, he remains of those few writers who gave its country a distinctive voice at a time when most of his fellow-compatriots contended themselves with channeling Conan Doyle.